Exploding paint bombs on a Glasgow council estate to sell televisions (Sony Bravia); running shoes that talk to your computer and connect you to a virtual network (Nike); a wind-up laptop making technology available in the remotest corners of the world, (One Laptop per Child); a video game that trains your brain (Nintendo);  visitors to Urbis in Manchester this Winter will be able to learn the stories behind the advertising and design that impacts on our lives.

The most important thing about a brainstorming session is what happens after it ends. No matter how poorly you run a brainstorming meeting, some decent ideas will surface. But depending on what happens after the session, those ideas may or may not impact anything. So while you can read books and take courses on better brainstorming techniques, the most important thing is figuring out how the brainstorming session fits into the larger decision making process you or your team has. Even if you fix how you run the meeting itself, and get better ideas, if you cant migrate them into the decision making process for the project, whats the point? With this central point in mind, the following essay covers how to run brainstorming sessions in a way that is most likely to be effective afterwards.

About the AuthorKenya Hara (1958) is a graphic designer, Professor at the Art University Musashino and communication advisor for Muji.

Representing a new generation of designers in Japan, Kenya Hara (born 1958) pays tribute to his mentors, using long overlooked Japanese icons and images in much of his work. In Designing Design, he impresses upon the reader the importance of emptiness in both the visual and philosophical traditions of Japan, and its application to design, made visible by means of numerous examples from his own work: Hara for instance designed the opening and closing ceremony programs for the Nagano Winter Olympic Games 1998. In 2001, he enrolled as a board member for the Japanese label MUJI and has considerably moulded the identity of this successful corporation as communication and design advisor ever since. Kenya Hara, alongside Naoto Fukasawa one of the leading design personalities in Japan, has also called attention to himself with exhibitions such as Re-Design: The Daily Products of the 21st Century of 2000.

Web page layouts: ways and means and meaning. Grids and rules; columns fixed, liquid, and elastic. Size, color, and contrast. To center or not to center. Layout and genre. Print paradigms and new media approaches. Let the web be the web. (36 articles)

So many voices have expressed their thoughts on Adobes new icons so far and one of the more noticeable one from users is that they all thought it was some temporary place holder art. When I first saw the splash screen and application icon of Adobe Photoshop CS3 my thinking pattern was that Macromedia had its influence in the branding process: the idea of using different colors for each application and the way the splash screen is organized.

Its been almost a year and a half since I posted Transparent custom corners and borders, a technique for creating custom corners and borders with optional alpha transparency. The technique is based on a combination of CSS and JavaScript, and gives you a lot of flexibility when creating rounded corners or special borders.